1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to data organization and more particularly to a system and method for organizing patient data to provide coherence to related information in disparate sources.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, multi-modal medical records (various modalities of medical imaging, different types of text reports, and laboratory data) are stored in Electronic Patient Records (EPR). EPR stores and manages all patient related data in their native digital file format (video, image, text, etc.), which does not satisfy all the information needs of the users of the data (clinicians, nurses, etc.) for considering the special characteristics of different patients. Clinicians and other users of data in health-care institutions are interested in obtaining information concerning different anatomical and pathologic concepts (e.g. tumor, edema region, mitral valve, etc.) to better assess the patient's condition. However, the heterogeneous sources of data lack any coherent organization of their content around the relevant medical concepts that are observable within them.
Relationships between relevant concepts and their associated attributes (color, size, density, texture, dosage, etc.) across an artifact are also not easily obtained. Furthermore, the lack of proper concept-based organization of the multi-modal medical records prevents the users of such records from tracking the evolution of a concept through time, and does not allow one to study the variations of the characteristics of a set of concepts of interest across a cohort of patients for decision support tasks.
Electronic Patient Records (EPR)—e.g., Siemens™ system, VISTA™, WebCIS™, etc. have the following shortcomings. Only document and file level access to patient records is provided through these systems. These systems do not provide access to concepts and their linkage to their manifestations in different modalities embedded in the documents. Formats used for keeping medical records are generic and do not reflect personal characteristics of the patients. It is very difficult to evaluate temporal change and monitor the evolution of the characteristics of conditions or occurrence of new ones for a given patient across time. Because of lack of access to concepts and linkage, it is difficult to compare different patients with respect to certain attributes of medical problems for population studies.
A Generic Electronic Health Record (GEHR) is a refined version of the above solution, in the sense that medical data are captured and stored based on concepts. Although this standard provides access to concepts, it does not provide linkage of the concepts at any level to their multi-media/modal manifestations. Also, multi-media data are regarded as a whole document in GEHR, and access to their spatio-temporal content structure is not provided or envisioned.
Research in concept-mapping is restricted to mapping concepts spotted in articles or text documents to existing ontologies such as UMLS, or GO (Gene Ontology). The mapping process does not consider the multimodal nature of the medical records, and the concept graphs that are constructed based on text documents only. Further, such systems do not attempt to deal with the semantic meanings inherent in these text documents.